However, being the daughter of a teacher is something you can’t shake off entirely. In grade school the “slow” (a word no longer used by teachers in connection with intelligence) girls were made to sit next to me in class in order to “absorb” my “good influence.” Not, as some may think, so they could copy the answers off my test papers—these were more tightly guarded than a nuclear arms facility. If anyone so much as glanced at my paper I would scream bloody murder. This was not a very pakikisama thing to do, but you have to understand that I did not live by the code of student behavior (“Don’t tell on your classmates”). I obeyed the code of my mother the teacher (“Cheating must be punished with extreme prejudice”). Her pupils, she pointed out, became doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, managers and expats. She taught them to exercise their strengths, mitigate their failings, and accept themselves for what they were.
And being a teacher’s daughter I considered it my responsibility to help my seatmates with their schoolwork. During study period, sometimes during recess, I would discuss the lesson with them. One of my seatmates had difficulty reading, so I would ask her to read her homework to me. After a few sessions I concluded that hers was mostly a self-confidence issue.
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